The Liar’s Tale: A Review of Christophe Bernard’s The Hollow Beast

The Hollow Beast
Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler
Biblioasis
2024, 616 pp., $28.95

All Gaspesians are liars, says a character in Christophe Bernard’s new novel The Hollow Beast. They’re also natural storytellers in this twisting and winding shaggy-dog story where all the fun is in the telling.

In his first book available in English, the Québécois author and translator takes readers deep into rural Québec and headlong into a century-long feud between families. It’s a long story that’s alternately funny and bittersweet, and sometimes feels like a hall of mirrors. But even at its trickiest, The Hollow Beast is a compelling read.

The feud starts simply enough: Victor Bradley comes to Paspébiac as the new mailman and immediately rubs local raconteur Monti Bouge the wrong way. Tensions simmer until a local hockey game goes into overtime. While playing goalie, Bouge makes what should be a save when he catches a shot with his teeth. But Bradley, acting as referee, calls it a goal. Tensions boil over. The two men are at odds for the rest of their days and their hatred is passed all the way down to Monti’s grandson François, a failed academic and doomed alcoholic who’s trying to write a book to make sense of his family history and emotional inheritance.

It’s a long story that’s alternately funny and bittersweet, and sometimes feels like a hall of mirrors. But even at its trickiest, The Hollow Beast is a compelling read.

Bernard’s Gaspésie is packed with colourful characters and memorable scenes. There’s the shady original distillers of Yukon, a style of alcohol everyone in town’s hooked on, nightmarish parties where unoccupied cottages are commandeered and left in splinters, and enough drunks and gamblers that readers may need a flow chart to keep them all straight.

Through it all, Bernard flits between past and present. He moves between the 1910s, where he charts Monti’s rise as a local tycoon into old age, and present day, where François travels back to his hometown from Montreal after burning out as an academic and writer, a burnout caused by years spent digging through archives and libraries and writing a long, unruly manuscript about a grandfather he never got to know. His project mirrors Bernard’s narrative, in which Monti is portrayed as a complex man with a dark side. But when François presents his grandfather as a flawed man in his work, it’s soundly rejected by both the academy and his family.

At times, François resembles Moses Burger, the protagonist of Mordecai Richler’s novel Solomon Gursky Was Here. Like Burger, he’s obsessed with a past figure who seems too big and wild for this world. Monti travelled West, made a fortune in gold, and, when he returned home, seemed to be one step ahead of his peers. His business moves paid off handsomely, making his fortune rise higher and higher. And like the sad sack, alcoholic, and haunted Burger, François is a struggling writer who can’t keep the bottle at bay:

He’d been rehydrating for several hours now, but the bottle still seemed full. Yet the alcohol had ennobled his temples. The bridge of his nose, more prominent than ever, lent him the profile of a centurion. His sideburns were more and more luxuriantly embossed. He can hold his liquor, the driver inwardly observed.

At other times, the madcap pace and comic exaggeration in Bernard’s prose brings to mind the work of Thomas Pynchon, particularly his novel Vineland. Pratfalls abound in The Hollow Beast, as do side stories, tangents, and set pieces. Everyone here has a story to tell and Bernard fits them all into an overstuffed narrative. Here’s Monti, getting drunk on a train back home and talking a bartender’s ear off:

Monti’s mouth was numb to the point where everything came out as if he’d just arrived from the tooth puller’s. Orange blossoms were about to start growing out of his ears, his brain wasn’t sending orders to the right places of his body, he wiggled his fingers over his glass in an attempt to fill it himself with an abracadabra.
‘One of these days,’ he mumbled to the barman, ‘you’ll have to come over to our place for supper. I’ll tell you about the poker game when an extraordinary beast led me to my seam in a river I’d just won.’
After that the barman decided to discreetly water down the Grand Marnier.

Bernard is a heck of a storyteller. His family drama spans the 20th century and travels across Canada, from desolate mining towns to a crowded Montreal hospital. Characters chase their demons, teenagers go missing, and enough alcohol is drunk to stun an elephant. Yet even as Bernard moves through time or between characters, he never loses control of the plot. The narrative moves steadily towards a bittersweet climax set during a whiteout blizzard, and by the end, you’re left feeling like you’ve been guided there with a steady hand. The Hollow Beast is not just a comic read: it's also a reflection on what happens when the weight of your family history crushes you and you can’t live up to familial expectations. This must not have been an easy one for Lazer Lederhendler to translate, but his effort reads fluidly and never gets lost in the details.

The narrative moves steadily towards a bittersweet climax set during a whiteout blizzard, and by the end, you’re left feeling like you’ve been guided there with a steady hand.

After some 600 pages and trips all around time and the peninsula, one might be left wondering what this was all for: the trap doors and mirrors in the plot, the digressions and lingering questions. But this question misses the forest for the trees—much of the fun of The Hollow Beast is in the telling, in the adventures of Monti and François. Those with the patience to stick with it will find a remarkably fun book that surges with energy.